Tales of adventures in quilting, gardening, photography and cooking from the Kingdom of Chiconia

The Cloths of Heaven 11: silvery moonlight

Loud hurrahs all round, it’s a beast to use, very slippery, easily tangled, with a mind of its own and strongly inclined to stretch and fray. But: the effect is really quite lovely.

The following photos simply don’t do justice to the pretty twinkle of the informal spiral stitching on the moon and around the edges of the clouds. The same stitching along the tops of the mountains is meant to suggest moonlit silhouettes, not entirely successfully, but still, pretty…

Sadly, the very light that makes the thread shine is what makes the images blow out in the photos. What you see is the best I can manage for the close-ups.

I’ll have the silver outlining finished probably by the end of tonight. After that I’ll be doing the filling in for the clouds in variegated grey, the sky and mountains in dark blue, and the quilting for the blue- green poem circle in a nice dark teal.

It’ll look a lot better when I’ve got the centre quilted and I can take out all the safety pins.Give me a couple of days…

34 thoughts on “The Cloths of Heaven 11: silvery moonlight”

I hope it will be a good quilt for the niece. It has just occurred to me that another of her sisters is visiting Australia in 3 months, and could carry it back for me… I’m going to see if I can ramp up the speed a bit. It would save all that nerve wracking that follows mailing the thing…

I did not realize you were having difficulty with the silver thread. A quilting friend was using some and also struggling. I offered her the use of a product I just bought for use with my embroidery thread called Thread Magic. She shrugged and gave me that look but when she re-threaded the needle, made use of it. The rest of the day was easy sailing and she went to get some of her own before our next meeting. It was my first try at it since my bees wax had all dried out. I think it actually works better. I know it’s too late now but maybe if you try it again. Your work is so stunning that I couldn’t tell you were having any problems.

I have it, thank you! The trouble is, the silver thread is wrapped around a central core, and develops ‘edges’ which seem to dig in and scoop up blobs of the Thread Magic. These are then deposited on the surface of the fabric, which is not a great effect with the dark blue… I tested it, and had to stop. Hence the grump!

Worth testing; some threads may not capture blobs of the stuff. It works beautifully with the variegated grey, which is a machine thread rather than pre-treated hand quilting thread like the other two.

I often look at quilts made by other people, and wonder how they were achieved, or how come they could get it right and I couldn’t? So as I was tackling problems along the way, I thought it might be helpful to discuss the problems and how I got past them. It’s good to share!

I imagine the sparkly thread would be hard to photograph. Don’t fret. It is always more important that things look good in real life than in photos.
(Or so I say, as I always look like a cross-eyed twit in photos.)

I haven’t used metallic thread very much with hand sewing but I know I found it a complete pain in the sewing machine. It does look lovely though. I didn’t even notice the pins until you said it – at first glance I thought you’d done something tricksy with 3D effects. It’s early…..

Not long now till I have the landscape finished. After that, I have to quilt the poetry circle, then fix down the stems and do the tendrils, stitch on the leaves, and the work is half done! The panels round the outside will be much quicker… except, perhaps, for making dozens and dozens of yoyos!